Keeping the tabs that are recipe prefixes?

[philderbeast]

Could fix-whitespace help with make files (Makefile and .mk), keeping the tabs that are recipe prefixes but fixing other whitespace?

A workaround would be to use a .RECIPEPREFIX, one of the special variables, to pick something other than tab.

[ulysses4ever]

Handling makefiles specially sounds like a good idea: that's what vim/emacs do too, I think. The implementation will have to try to be elegant but it's hard when it comes to special cases.

We will need to know what Andreas thinks about it but in principle: do you want to volunteer?

[philderbeast]

I'm loving fix-whitespace. A consequence of adding andreasabel/fix-whitespace-action is that I have to replace tab characters in code snippets taken from make files if I want to fix whitespace in markdown files. I tried <tab> but that looked ugly. There's a unicode symbol for right tab that looks OK, like in this snippet from updo/README.md:

updo/Makefile:
⇥ rm -rf updo
⇥ curl -sSL ${UPDO_URL} | tar -xz
⇥ mv updo-* updo
⇥ chmod +x $$(grep -RIl '^#!' updo)